Presenting a ship on stage can be something of a challenge for set designers. It certainly makes for a striking stage picture, as in Tim Albery’s production of Der fliegende Holländer. But why include a ship in a drama in the first place?

One aspect comes from a ship’s most basic function: travel. It is a transitional space taking its occupants from one place to another, usually from the known to the unknown – which is where the drama can gain its impetus. One example is Act I of Tristan und Isolde, set on board the ship transporting the Irish princess Isolde to Cornwall to marry King Marke. Early designs for Tristan und Isolde adopted a realistic approach, creating naturalistic stage pictures of the ship and deck. This literal approach was still in use by the middle of the 20th century – as this image from the Covent Garden Opera Company’s 1948 production shows.

By the time of The Royal Opera’s 1971 production, the curve towards the prow of the ship, a central mast and a vast billowing sail had a pared-down naturalism edging into symbolism. Later productions, including Christof Loy’s for The Royal Opera, abstract the qualities of the ship’s purpose rather than its appearance, interpreting it conceptually as a confining space removed from the rest of the world. Indeed, a ship is in essence a contained world of its own, which amplifies the moods and emotions of the characters trapped in it. Acts set on ships can be fraught with expectation, often unpleasantly fulfilled.

Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd is probably the most familiar of the few operas set entirely on ships. E.M. Forster’s libretto is based on Herman Melville’s recounting of events on a British man-o’-war in 1797. The atmosphere on-board becomes intensely claustrophobic as mutiny threatens. The set for the 1951 premiere gives an idea of this cramped space, created naturalistically on the large stage of the Royal Opera House. The ship stands for a sealed microcosm of mankind, in which Captain Vere, all too human, is caught between the goodness of able seaman Billy Budd and the evil of the Master-at-arms, Claggart. When Vere sings of being ‘lost on the infinite sea’, the metaphor for life itself is clear. Vere’s personal isolation and search for direction is compared to a ship in the middle of an ocean – he is ‘all at sea’.

Britten’s Peter Grimes evokes the atmosphere and the life of a fishing village, but while boats and events on and around them figure in the story, we never go out with the characters to sea – most poignantly at the end, when Peter sails out alone for the last time. Nonetheless, the curved wood of boats so often finds its way into designs for the opera – as in Peter’s hut in the Royal Opera production from 1975.

With the current production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, the ship is present in vast form. The whole drama is played out on a sleek and curved rising, iron hull of a large ship rolled onto its side, with hints of rusted metal. Whereas Billy Budd is literally set on a ship, this production of Der fliegende Holländer has the nautical connection pervade the atmosphere through a subtle, constant, physical presence. And like a talisman, Senta has a model ship as a sign of her identification with the myth of the Dutchman and its story of a redeeming love. The combination of a lit candle and the model boat alongside her intense passion for the story give the image a devotional feel, with a sense of hope. But by the end of the opera, the image of Senta is entirely different as she retreats into a solitary world, focussed on the model ship. It is all she has – the Dutchman has gone, leaving her alone with her futile imaginings.

Today marks 100 years since the birth of Benjamin Britten, one of the great composers of the 20th century.

Britten’s compositions span classical music forms, from large-scale symphonic scores to songs and choral works. He first achieved international fame in 1945 with the acclaimed premiere of his opera Peter Grimes. One hundred years after his birth, more operas by Britten are performed worldwide than by any other composer born in the 20th century, and he is widely credited with founding a new English-language opera tradition. He also introduced generations of children to music through such works as Noye’s Fluddeand The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which is now the focus of an iPad app. 'His music really gets under your skin, which makes him stand out,' says Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano.

Benjamin Britten invigorated British music making like no other figure, and nowhere more so than in opera. Founded just a year after the premiere of Peter Grimes, the Covent Garden Opera Company (The Royal Opera from 1968) might have been an obvious ally but collaborations between the composer and Covent Garden were complex affairs and often fraught with in-fighting.

Britten's Royal Opera House debut was with Peter Grimes in 1947. The opera had already enjoyed phenomenal success from its first performance at Sadler's Wells on 7 June 1945 – but not without some personal cost. Though director and soprano Joan Cross adored the score, the company were not overjoyed to discover their first peacetime opera would be a new work by a 31-year-old conscientious objector. Add in the sotto voce rumours over Britten and Peter Pears’s relationship and the result was a poisonous rehearsal atmosphere. Eventually Cross left the company under storm clouds and Peter Grimes was dropped from the Sadler's Wells repertory at Britten’s explicit request. The subsequent 1947 Royal Opera House production was an on-stage success, but Britten had learnt to be wary.

Britten’s first Royal Opera House commission, Billy Budd, was created for the 1951 Festival of Britain – though a troubled gestation meant that the opera missed the festival by several months. Britten and his librettist E.M. Forster collided over the depiction of Billy’s nemesis Claggart and Forster’s polite condescension soon turned into overt contempt. Pears remembered Forster talking to Britten ‘as though he were an insolent servant’; Forster wrote ‘I am rather a fierce old man at the moment, and he is rather a spoilt boy’. Despite mixed reviews Billy Budd established itself in the repertory, more thoroughly so when Britten revised the opera into two acts for a BBC broadcast in 1961, first performed on stage at the Royal Opera House in 1964.

In 1952 Britten accepted an unprecedented commission to mark the new Queen’s coronation with a gala opera. Britten and his librettist William Plomer audaciously chose Lytton Strachey’s ambivalent Elizabeth and Essex as their source – the result was Gloriana. At the opera’s premiere on 8 June 1953 Cross and Pears sang the star roles to a gala gathering of royalty and political bigwigs. It was a catastrophe. The audience – not selected for their love of 20th-century music – railed against music ‘as clamorous and ugly as hammers striking steel rails’ and a subtext that they perceived insult to the Queen. But Richard Jones's production of this complex masterpiece is long overdue: aside from two performances by Opera North of Phyllida Lloyd's production in 1994, the opera has not been seen at the Royal Opera House since 1953.

Of Britten's ten subsequent stage works only two were for the Royal Opera House. Britten’s sole ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, commissioned by John Cranko for Sadler’s Wells Ballet, suffered when Cranko and Britten fell out, and despite Britten’s radiant score the ballet was deemed a failure (Kenneth MacMillan considerably remedied its problems with a new scenario in his 1989 Royal Ballet production, revived last Season). The very last was Britten’s television opera Owen Wingrave, broadcast in 1971 and staged in 1973 at the Royal Opera House – where it became obvious Britten had composed with a keen eye on its suitability for live performance.

No matter how tempestuous his operas' geneses, Britten's music tells a different story. Luminous and often heartbreaking his 100th anniversary is definitely worth celebrating.

The five Canticles span almost thirty years. Performed together they provide a compelling map of Britten’s composing life, and were created in the wake of some of his most famous operas including Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw. A cast of leading musicians will gather to perform the pieces, including renowned Britten interpreters tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake.

‘The Canticles are a funny mixture of the religious and the secular,’ says Ian. ‘Britten wrote the first Canticle in the late 1940s and it’s a setting of a metaphysical poem, a religious text, but at the same time it’s also a love song to Peter Pears.’

‘There’s no question that Pears’s voice absolutely shapes the music, and the lines are constructed to suit his voice. It’s this mixture of the robust middle voice and the ability to be ethereal at the top, which I think was very special about Pears’s approach to singing.’

We caught up with Ian and Julius in rehearsals. After an intimate run-through of Canticles I and III, Ian told us about what makes the Canticles special, how they relate to Britten’s life and work, and what challenges lie in performing them.

Benjamin Britten's five Canticles, written between 1947 and 1974 and to be staged at the Royal Opera House this July, almost perfectly book-end his post-war career. But what are canticles and how do they relate to the composer's operatic output?

The loosely-defined term 'canticles' originally meant a short prayer-like song, but was probably best known to Britten from the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis texts that feature in the Anglican evening service. His texts span widely across English literature, drawing on a medieval Chester Miracle Plays, Jacobean metaphysical poetry and poems by Edith Sitwell and T.S. Eliot. All but the last have biblical inspiration, but none are specifically liturgical. Are these works prayers, or did 'canticle' have a separate significance for Britten?

The Canticles are a quintet of chamber works for a range of instrumentation, but their one constant is a tenor part. Each was written for Britten’s partner and muse Peter Pears. Performed together they present a powerful celebration of the composer's unique musical language.

Canticle I was written in memory of Reverend Dick Sheppard, founder of the Peace Pledge Union (a committed pacifist, Britten had been a member since its formation in 1934). Britten selected 17th-century poet Francis Quarles's 'My Beloved is Mine', an adaptation of the Song of Solomon: in Britten's hands a serenely radiant paean to love. First performed by Pears and Britten, it seems intended as an overt declaration of their relationship, a testament to both their joint artistic creativity and their personal commitment to each other.

Written in the wake of Billy Budd, Canticle II was composed between late 1951 and early 1952 and is a potent miniature opera for alto, tenor and piano created from a 15th-century Chester Miracle Play telling the story of Abraham and Isaac. Written for and dedicated to contralto Kathleen Ferrier (who created the title role in The Rape of Lucretia in 1946), her part is now more commonly sung by a counter-tenor. Britten later drew on Canticle II for his War Requiem, in the setting of Wilfred Owen's bitter retelling of the biblical story.

1954's Canticle III was another operatic pendant, following the premiere of The Turn of the Screw by just a few months. The Canticle is an aching, plangent outpouring of grief, setting Sitwell's The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn. Its scoring for tenor, horn and piano recalls the sonority of Britten's 1943 Serenade; both were written for the brilliant horn player Dennis Brain. Britten wrote the Canticle for a memorial service for the young pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, who had taken his life the year before.

Seventeen years separated Canticle IV from its predecessor. Britten's setting of Eliot's The Journey of the Magi is written for alto, tenor, baritone and piano, the three male voices characterizing the kings on their wearying journey. Joining Britten and Pears in the premiere were counter-tenor James Bowman and bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk, both regular collaborators with Britten.

Canticle V, written 1974, was Britten's first work after heart surgery the previous year had left his right hand partly paralysed; its scoring for tenor and harp is a poignant reminder that Britten's piano-playing days were over. It was written for the great Welsh harpist Osian Ellis, for whom Britten wrote his 1969 Suite for harp. Britten dedicated this last Canticle to William Plomer, the librettist for Gloriana and the Church Parables, whose death in 1973 had left Britten deeply shaken. He once more turned to Eliot (one of the few poets he continued to read after his surgery), choosing his mysterious early work The Death of St Narcissus.

The impassioned spirituality of each of the Canticles, and that they were all written for Pears, suggests that their significance for Britten, whatever its explicit cause, was deeply personal. From the impassioned devotion of Canticle I to the destructive obsession with beauty of Canticle V, these innately dramatic works seethe with an intensity that belies their simple forces. Neil Bartlett and Paule Constable face a challenge in staging them – but a rewarding one.

Britten's Canticles run in the Linbury Studio Theatre from 10 - 12 July 2013. All dates are sold out, though returns may become available.